de Blob 2 Co-Op Review

A few years ago developer Blue Tongue Entertainment had this brilliant idea. Literally, a brilliant idea full of color and a quirky cast of rebels out to paint the world. If everyone can please take a moment to open their minds to the color of the de Blob 2 world, we can go on one of the best cross-platform adventures imagined. Bring your kids, or siblings, or whoever likes good, simple fun with a splash of challenge.

Pick up a controller and you become one with the hero of the game: Blob. Blob is a ball of water who picks up any color he gets close to, able to paint the world. His size is based on how much paint he has in him, and he uses that paint from his body to paint walls, pillars, buildings, and bring the world back to life.

Blob is joined by a variety of characters who are all brightly colored to match the theme of the game. These characters will help Blob by giving you tasks to advance the story. Since all of your allies are colorful good-guys, it’s time to introduce the bland bad-guys.

Your first enemy that comes from the first game is Conrade Black. In the first game Blob defeated Conrade Black and sent him to a sky ship out on his own. Well, Conrade Black is back. He’s crash landed on a beautiful, colorful island and started sucking the color out of everything.

Conrade Black is an all-black version of Blob, corrupted by dark ink. In Conrade Black’s color-less world, much of the water supply is replaced by ink. If Blob touches the ink, it hurts him and he’s suddenly unable to paint the world until he washes the ink off. When Blob touches the water, he turns clear again and can pick up any color he chooses.

The all-white enemy of the color world is Blanc, who creates a cult around removing color. His cult followers will attack Blob when he tries to paint things, and they are the most common enemies of the world. As you advance from one stage to another, you’ll see a lot more bad guys and a lot more ways to paint the world.

In the beginning of the game, Blob sits in paint pools to soak up paint (up to 100 points of paint to start with). These pools completely replace Blob’s color. Later on you’ll see some spider-robots that suck the paint out of buildings. When blob destroys these enemies, he can mix paint colors to create new colors.

When you destroy a Red and Blue spider-robot, you’ll get a Purple paint. Mix Yellow and Blue for Green paint, etc. This is important for some of the more challenging paint jobs. Some buildings require a specific color to complete the paint job which lures out the Greydians or other civilians to repopulate the world with colorful blobs - so you’ll have to hit the right part of the building with the right color.

Alternately you play the game as a platforming game, where the screen changes to a side-scrolling game and you spend your energy solving puzzles more than making sure you paint everything. The side-scrolling parts of the game come from inside of buildings or sewers, and you have to paint certain switches to unlock paint pools or restore important buildings in these sequences.

So what is your goal with the game? Run out Conrade Black from the color world by restoring color to everything. Each stage has a certain number of objectives to complete; paint all of the buildings, free all of the slaves (citizens are enslaved when they’re all-grey “Greydians”), and restore all of the flowers and trees. You can complete all of these things by rolling around the entire stage to touch things with a painted Blob.

Co-op changes the game a little bit. If you plug in another controller, you play as Pinky. Pinky is a floating robot that assists Blob through the story, but you can play as her with your second player. As Pinky, you get a pink reticle (circle and cross-hair) to shoot paint at the screen. Well, you can shoot pink at certain items you would be able to pick up in the world.

Each of the levels have a time-limit, so having a second player help earn extensions is fairly handy. You earn extensions on the time-limit by completing tasks like freeing Greydians or painting buildings. Once the story goal is done on the level, you can basically free-roam and complete challenges as well as finish up any collectible hunting or painting you may have missed.

Pinky can’t help paint buildings, or continue the storyline. In fact, Pinky can’t even earn achievements. As soon as player two drops in, a notice pops up to remind you that “Player two cannot earn achievements through the story.” Pinky can help with picking up color particles (which help Blobs score) and blast some of the enemies later in the game.

The Co-op (and general gameplay) feels a lot like Super Mario Galaxy, only you can play it on Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or Wii however you so choose. It is nice to see the game expand from the Wii, but it is certainly designed for the Wii. Much of the movement and camera feels like you’re playing a Wii game, even with an Xbox 360 controller.

I will give a hearty ten points to Gryffindor de Blob for a very fun loading screen. The story is relayed to you through silly movements and adorable sounds of the main characters, but the dialog is actually written in the loading screen. When you’re waiting for the game to load for each level, you can hit the A button to read a comic book style story. Or, you can paint all over the screen with your pointer.

The variety of gameplay seen in de Blob 2 makes it so everyone who plays the game won’t get bored. There are also a lot of challenges after you complete each level so you get more points and can really get back at Conrade Black. for people who played the original de Blob on the Wii: It transfers over to the other consoles fairly well, but the Wii version is still perfectly intact. If you liked the first, de Blob 2 should sing in colors to you.